Twitter Co-Founder Biz Stone Invests In Visit, Delhi-Based AI-Powered Chatbox

Ever thought what is common between the maddening chaos of India’s capital New Delhi and world’s most popular micro-blogging platform, Twitter? To most of us the answer might be a surprising one. It’s a start-up firm. Reports are just in that one of Twitter’s most influential execs, its co-founder, Biz Stone has recently invested in a New Delhi-based startup by the name of “Visit”.

Actually an artificial intelligence powered chatbot, visit, is a brain-child of young talented students from the revered Birla Institute of Technology and Science- Pilani, Rajasthan. A bright outcome of four inquisitive and determined minds- Anurag Prasad, Vaibhav Singh, Shashvat Tripathi and Chetan Anand, “Visit” an efficient AI-powered tool is meant for health advice learning that assists doctors.

How “Visit” can be used is fairly simple. People can interact with the chat-box in explaining and mentioning their symptoms. The bot, thereafter, asks further questions and upon collecting its primary task of gathering more symptoms, which finally leads to suggesting the order of the treatment. This triaging, therefore, takes place in simple conversational form and is relatively low-stress in nature. Twitter’s co-founder Biz Stone explained the following on a popular blogging platform, medium.

But that said, it may be a common query as to what exactly is the reason behind the institution of Visit and its formation? The main idea, as explained by the four founders, is to lead to democratising of healthcare by shrinking the shortage of doctors by relying on AI. There’s no surprise that in India, the number of patients are often thrice the number of doctors available, actively on the ground. As a result, there seems to exist a huge need-gap in the dimension of those who need treatment and care and the care that is actually available, resting in limited trained hands. Latest statistics paint a rather grim picture, suggesting that for every doctor there are around 2000 patients lined up in clinics.

The queues are often endless and the procedures take place a sizeable part of a person’s daily time. Visit chats are therefore helpful in making patients more aware and knowledgeable about their conditions, symptoms and, subsequent treatments. The chatbox is enabled to answer queries factoring in somewhere in the range of 20,000 probabilistic relationships between different variables- conditions, symptoms, risk factors, past history and other co-relating elements. But in most cases, where patients are often perturbed about being in touch with medical experts upon the treatment of a condition- there’s no reason to sweat.

Visit allows patients the ease of access to stay in touch with their practitioner over chat for follow-up. We are in an age where everyday AI is redefining our lives and changing the course of action in divergent spheres related to public life. Therefore, Twitter’s co-founder, who had been on a brief visit to New Delhi explained that, “Investing in Visit is my small way of contributing to a future where AI is seen as a positive enhancement of humanity.” It is, without doubt a colossal achievement from the perspective of the four youngsters to have the alignment and synergies of someone like a Twitter in their pathbreaking creation.